He was so tired of his past. Tired of the explanations, tired of remembering it, all of it was just a burden. Literally carrying the memories around in his mind, it was like a five hundred pound gorilla, not in the room, but squeezed right between his ears. He had dyed his hair and cut it short. He shaved his face clean too. He was wearing contact lenses that made his brown eyes blue. He got up in the dark hours of every morning so he could spend two hours sponging pancake make-up all over his arms to cover the tattoos that were all over them. He had to leave so quickly last time that there was no time for laser removal treatments. And since he only got the damn things to fit in better at the last place, they could not complain. Even as he waited the few minutes for the stage make-up to dry, he checked the mirror for any trace of the old him. The old surgery scars that had changed his brow and nose shapes were almost completely faded. Which was a good thing because he paid that foreign doctor triple what he deserved. You always hear horror stories about surgeries south of the border. Christ, more bad memories! He checked his arms one more time to make sure the make-up was totally dry and that the tattoos were completely covered. As he walked over to his closet, he hoped that maybe this would be the place. In time maybe he could relax and even find peace here. He might even find some time to get these tattoos removed. But he tried not to think thoughts like that because they just weren’t the reality. He stared into the long mirror to see the whole package. He tucked the starched black shirt into the waistband of his pants. There was a light knock on his door. “Be right there”, he replied. The accent still sounded fake to him but it seemed good enough that no one around here questioned it. Maybe this was the place. The door opened a crack and from the dark hallway beyond a woman’s voice said, “The kids are ready for Sunday school breakfast with you, Father.” “I am coming now Sister, thank you.”

I rolled over for the nine hundred ninety seventh time that night. I am so aggravated! I see the giant red numbers of my alarm clock telling me it is 3:05 in the morning. I get even more angry. Now I have to decide if it is worth trying to get a few hours sleep before the alarm goes off or to just give up and start my day super early. I mean there is only myself to blame. I decided to break up with my boyfriend in the middle of a record heat wave. And I decided to move out of our lovely air conditioned condo because I couldn’t stand all the reminders of him. Of course it never occurred to me that our beautiful condo wouldn’t sell instantly. Or that I would have to move into this super cheap loft apartment until it sells. And I definately could not fathom that anywhere in this day and age would have no air conditioning. But here I sit for the third night in a row kept up by my droning army of fans. I have huge box fans in the windows and a few scattered here and there for air flow. I have tall oscillating fans by my bed and by my couch area. I have a few short oscillating ones too because their boxes had the word blizzard on them and I couldn’t resist. I even have some small ones like on my desk. I even have one in the powder room that I use to keep cool when putting on my make up and I even use it to dry my long hair in the back. They are all just doing their jobs and I know that but at night they might as well be an angry hornet’s nest. And I know the easy answer is to turn them off but it doesn’t drop below 80° at night because of the heat wave. I would sweat to death. I have tried everything to make peace with the fans. I pulled up fond memories of getting close and making funny noises into the fan. And the great memories of the fans at my family’s old lake house. I even tried to imagine they were one of those expensive white noise machines that people buy to fall asleep to. Nothing convinced me they we anything more than angry hornets nests whose hornets all had the faces of my ex on them. And who were surrounding me with annoying noise and preventing me from much deserved rest. So here I sit, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my bed, in the middle of the drone.

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

I have figured out how to share little snippets of my writing and creativity in this blog. I realized that I have books and books full of writing prompts. A writing prompt can be a picture, an object, a sentence or a question, almost anything really, that is used as a spark to jump-start creative writing. You are usually given the prompt, whatever it is, and then you write freely for a certain amount of time. Then in a workshop or class you would share what you wrote and where that prompt took you. It always amazes me how the same prompt can take authors in such different directions. So I will try to pick one prompt daily out of my books and write a little bit on it. I will put the prompt in the title of the post. Feel free to use them to spark your own creativity. I am really starting to like this blogging thing.